Passive Pickup with Sound FX come in.

Aloha,

I am thinking about putting a pickup into one my ukes. I really like the idea of messing around with sound effects, also on rare occasion i like to play insane rock mode on my line 6 amp.

Does anyone have a passive pickup and use sound effects plugging it straight in to the amp? I been getting some mix information from people saying i don't need a active preamp pickup to play sound effects properly and some people say, if using a passive pickup using heavy sound effects there is a high chance there will be allot of feedback howling.

I have not tried using heavy effects on a high quality passive pickup , in the past i had a ukulele with fishman preamp active pickup and it worked very well with effects. I am leaning towards a good quality passive pickup because i can get a good deal on one, but I am not sure if it will work well with the type of things i want to do. Also another suggestion was getting a passive and just using a external preamp on the side. Also how much are yall paying for your preamp pickups installed now days>?

Some info our advice would be great.

I think it depends on the quality of the passive pickup.

I used to have a Risa electric uke-stick, which has a passive Shadow nanoflex pickup (good quality), and that had a strong output and could handle effects, anything from clean acoustic to heavy distortion just fine.

My cheapo Mahalo with a passive pickup has a harsh sound with little output.

So if you're going passive, try to get a good one.
And get it set up by someone who knows what they're doing, or you might get some strings sounding louder than other strings (has suffered this).

An active preamp would make the signal cleaner with a fuller sound. And also allows you to finetune the tone with the extra knobs.
I haven't used one before though, as I always prefer having a uke with built-in active preamp.